The Mormon Monk

As I recently read Eric Andrews's excellent new book,  Native Apostles  (Harvard UP, 2013), I was struck by his report that Native New England peoples who converted to Christianity identified their new religious beliefs as "a rebirth of spiritual knowledge that the ancestors possessed but had long been forgotten by later generations. An oral tradition taken down in the seventeenth century reminded audiences that far from introducing novel concepts and cosmologies, Christian missionaries were simply picking up where the ancients had left off. . . . Christianity was, according to this narrative, an ancestral Indian religion that needed to be revitalized" (36-37). As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who believes in the Book of Mormon as a largely reliable historical source, this was tremendously exciting, so I checked out Andrews's sources. Turns out Andrews was relying on the book  Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklo...

Isaiah and Elder Bednar.

A brother monk shared this with me, and I simply had to share it with you. Enjoy! THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE: THOUGHTS ON CHRIST AND DEATH Even the smallest nudge can bring back the dead. Life tips easily either way, like the light around dusk. Neither death nor rapture, birth nor resurrection are as irreversible or permanent as we sometimes romanticize—this business of living and dying is infinitely more fluid. While it’s true that the smallest flick of a knife can lay open a whole throat, it’s also true a single centigrade of warmth deep in some winter dirt can trigger the vivification of a seed. I have sustained such a multiplicity of deaths already. I see a white cup on a table or the hood of a car covered in wet petals, and then I am startled to realize I have been dead for days. Dead to miracles, small impossibilities. Awakenings and resurrections may happen in an instant—in prayer, in traffic, while washing a plate. They may happen on the road to Da...

This is an experimental draft of a creative project; please feel free to offer criticisms, suggestions, or questions in the comments. Week 1 Dear Dad,             You were right. I’ve only been here a day, but I can already tell that the MTC is going to be amazing. My companion, Elder Hypocrite, is from a little suburb just outside the Celestial City limits called Whited Sepulchre, and I just know that we’re going to be a terrific team. Right after our orientation session, the MTC President called us as district leaders over the other four new elders who bunk in our dorm room as well as two sisters, and Elder Hypocrite has already come up with some fantastic rules that will help us to make the most of our time in the MTC. For instance, we’ve decided as a district that all of us are going to wake up at 6:00 AM instead of 6:30 so that we can all get in an extra half hour of personal study time. And, to mak...

Three and a half years ago, when I first began interviewing for academic jobs, every school that interviewed me wanted to know how I had managed to complete a Masters and a PhD degree in just four years. Back on the job market this past January, all thirteen of the schools that interviewed me wanted to know where I found the time to write as much as I do. In these professional settings, it would have been inappropriate to offer the religious and specifically Mormon understanding of time-use that I believe has allowed me to be especially productive. But since a good friend recently asked me the same question, here's the answer I would have liked to give my interviewers. The Book of Mormon teaches that this life is "a probationary state, a time to prepare to meet God" (Alma 12:24). Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints accordingly view time as a sacred commodity to be used according to specific guidelines given us by deity. Even the very name of the...

As a youth, I first gained a desire to make the gospel of Jesus Christ an integral part of all I did while reading in the Book of Mormon. I have a vivid memory of reading the words of Nephi, who instructs us “that ye must not perform any thing unto the Lord save in the first place ye shall pray unto the Father in the name of Christ, that he will consecrate thy performance unto thee, that thy performance may be for the welfare of thy soul” (2 Ne. 32:9). This commandment astonished me! I could think of many activities in which I engaged on a daily basis that did not begin with a prayer offered in Christ’s name and whose intended purpose had nothing to do with the welfare of my soul. In a burst of youthful zeal, I decided to repent and alter my habits so that my life better conformed to Nephi’s description of Christ-centered consecrated living. At the time, I spent an hour or more on most days playing basketball, and it was my great ambition to make the junior varsity team as a freshma...

God and his prophets rarely speak in superlatives: words like "never," "always," or "every" appear relatively infrequently in scripture and deserve our special attention. When the Lord God Almighty tells you to do something never or always, you best listen up. Within the corpus of scripture canonized by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the word  always  is attached to some form of commandment 32 times. Those are verses that should be etched in the memory of every Latter-day Saint. Most frequently, the word is associated with a commandment to "pray always." Fifteen separate times the word  always  is used in directing us to pray: Luke 18:1, 21:36; 3 Ne. 18: 15, 18, 19, 21; D&C 10:5; 20:33; 31:12; 32:4; 33:17; 61:39; 75:11; 88:126; 93:49. But familiar as the exhortation to "pray always" might be, most members of the Church are far more familiar with a different "always" commandment. Ever week baptized c...

I’ve figured out the job thing, and the book is back in my editor’s hands, so it’s time to resurrect my alter ego, the Mormon Monk. And, in honor of my book, how about a monkish meditation on Eden ? Let’s review: Eden was a place without death or disease, and it was inhabited by a man who knew so much about the natural world (theologians reading Genesis 2:19 have said) that he understood the nature of each animal as he met it and gave each its appropriate name. But transgression of divine law caused God to exile Adam and Eve from this paradisiacal existence; instead of reaping nature’s bounty, Adam would have to till the land and farm. I’ve summarized the Eden story because it bears a striking resemblance to the narrative laid out by Kenneth Kiple in his one-volume comprehensive history of food, A Movable Feast . While most of us think about the “primitive” hunter-gatherer peoples who lived before the invention of agriculture more than thirteen millennia ago with pity, acc...